i deleted all the social media off my phone and blocked their respective websites on my computer during the day. this website is one of the things i’m putting my time into to fill the void. part blog, part digital portfolio, crafted with my beginner html/css skills.
i have grown incredibly disillusioned with modern, corporatized social media especiall re: shorts/reels/tiktoks/short-form content. i don’t mean to say the content being produced is entirely bad, and i think there are people using the platforms in amazing and creative ways. but there’s something sinister about how all these major social media apps now utilize scrollable short-form videos, and how their algorithms are tailored to You specifically, making you never want to click off. social media at the end of the day is a business and in order to make money, they need to keep you on the app—in other words, addicted. it’s an endless feedback loop, an eternal tilt-a-whirl that keeps speeding up, and i’m over it. get me off of this ride, i’m going to hurl.
(this is hardly a novel idea, but i need a break from my socials regardless. a couple of months ago the explore page on my instagram began to show me posts about OCD symptoms and subtypes, warning signs and exposure strategies for a disorder that i know i already have, but because it was readily accessible it was impossible for me to ignore. i realized that the algorithm functions similarly to OCD itself, latching on to the common themes in your life and inflating them beyond the pale, only ending when you have the sense to close out of the scroll cycle, wondering where the time went. social media lost its sheen shortly after that.)
the idea to make this website came from this growing discontent and also from thinking about my creative instagram @digitalriver what would a "digital river" even look like? if a physical river is a body moving from one measurable point to another, is the distance of a digital river plotted in pixels? is it a progress bar, an image-hosting website, or both? how does the digital “me” move through the confines of a web browser? eventually i realized that i was thinking too hard about a screen name i thought of in 15 seconds, but at that point it seemed like my thinking was outgrowing the boundaries of a sterile profile.
this all compounded when i remembered recent conversations i’ve had with my sister, who has for the most part disavowed social media because of how much they overthink it, but at the same time wanting to connect with her peers in the online world. it’s a feeling i can relate to, probably because of our similar genetics (but also because posting anything makes me anxious to the point of nausea). the truth is it is impossible to engage with society today without being online in some capacity. going off the grid (while tempting) is too big of a jump in my opinion, especially as someone who still needs a real job. so i thought if i was going to exist online and post into the void, i wanted to at least do it on my own terms, at my own pace, in my own style. because social networking (and the internet) doesn't have to be this way. i turned to neocities because i wanted to build my own online space (sort of like the custom html on my tumblr blogs, which if you couldn't tell i was/ still am on tumblr let's be honest with ourselves for a second) and because i was/am inspired by other users on this platform who want to return to a "slower" web. hopefully once i get better at coding and such this will become a little corner of the web that i feel proud to call my own.